The answer to Brantford's jobs problem is not simple, but it is easily identifiable, city mayoral candidate John Sless said during a news conference Tuesday,
The city must learn to work with its neighbours, Six Nations and Brant County, before any real progress can be made on needed commercial-indus-trial development that leads to employment.
And, to that end, a joint three-municipality task force is needed to hammer out answers, Sless, a city councillor, told a small gathering Tuesday at an undeveloped commercial property on Wayne Gretzky Parkway.
Native protests are affecting development, said Sless, noting that everybody loses, particularly the reserve with its 24% unemployment rate. Courts are not the answer to native building protests and neither are hostilities, he insisted.
"We must get out of the court system and into the negotiating system," he said.
"We must set up a panel of two elected and one business leader from each community (Brantford, Brant County and Six Nations). A political leader in the respective community, assisted by appropriate support staff, will lead each panel... .
"All three communities (will) board one bus and head to Toronto and Ottawa and meet with appropriate ministers, demanding attention and action on (native land) claims."
And once solutions are arrived at to these political questions, the real question of job creation can be addressed in earnest, Sless said.
"We're not going to create jobs until there's peace in this community," he said after his speech. "It's just not going to happen."
Sless contended that other mayoral candidates are talking about the need to create jobs, but no one else has a plan to create them.
"No candidate is talking about a plan... a way to solve these problems," he said.
Under the terms of his plan, he said, the three-municipality task force will be active and ready to present a plan within 120 days. The task force will meet every two weeks from January to March, he added.
The cost to the taxpayer of this nine-person task force?
"Zero," said Sless, a smile forming on his face.
And that, he added, led to his next point -controlling taxes.
He recommended hiring a third-party reviewer, perhaps a business professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, to look at the way the city does business and recommend ways to stabilize taxes at a low level.
And once new jobs are created, he added, taxes no longer are such a big issue.